It is necessary to use effective methods of continuity management to help businesses in unforeseen situations. How does the use of modern methods help companies to work stably even during force majeure?
What is business continuity management?
In the modern information society, there is a growing dependence on business success on the efficient and continuous operation of the information infrastructure. Moreover, informatization and automation of all spheres of human activity entail an increase in the scale of industrial accidents and disasters, which increase the amount of damage to an economic entity.
Business continuity management implies an integrated approach to IT infrastructure. It covers several specific solutions, allowing you to ensure critical business processes’ stability and reliability. Virtualization tools and virtualized infrastructures, disaster recovery solutions, backup data centers, etc., are just one technological aspect. Ensuring physical security is an equally important point that requires its approaches within the framework of the overall organizational program for ensuring business continuity. The complexity of the approach implies precisely the coverage of a variety of measures and areas of activity – to collectively ensure its preservation in critical conditions.
The business continuity plan for applications and processes should contain the following:
- High data availability: Enterprises need constant access to data, applications, and processes, regardless of failures.
- The uninterrupted operation even during natural disasters: Scheduled backups and planned maintenance of your IT infrastructure will help you stay up and running in the event of a disaster.
- Disaster recovery processes to restore health: The ability to recover data as quickly as possible is critical. If the nearest data center is destroyed, there must be a way to get data from different sites to avoid inoperability.
Thus, the process of business continuity management is an important strategic task for the management of companies. This technology allows them to ensure virtually uninterrupted operation during small and medium-sized emergencies and restore their activities with minimal, pre-calculated losses in the event of large-scale disasters.
5 The most effective solutions for business continuity management
So, we present 5 of the most useful software solutions to ensure business continuity:
- Zmanda
Zmanda’s all-in-one cloud-based disaster recovery solution combines backup, disaster recovery, and secure access gateway support to scale backup across regions and for any number of workloads. Thus, ensuring the availability of your data when one of the sites is unavailable during a natural disaster.
- Board portal
The board management solution here offers the collegial bodies the ability to connect, share information and collaborate in the best way possible. Using mobile or web apps, users can easily create and manage video conferences and conduct confidential board meetings.
- Incident Manager
It is a crisis management system that allows you to manage information centrally, ensure effective communication between all stakeholders, manage recovery teams, and record all events for further analysis.
- Freshworks
The software provides organizations of all sizes with SaaS customer engagement solutions that enable support, sales, and marketing professionals to effectively communicate with customers to improve customer experience and collaborate with team members to solve customer issues.
- Archer Business Resiliency
This effective business resiliency program aligns business impact analysis, business continuity planning, IT disaster recovery planning, crisis recovery planning, and incident response operations with the objectives and strategies of the business as a whole.